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So, using a Staff as a wizard is a bit weird with wands in the picture. In original sin, there was no magic ranged weapon, so if you wanted to attack from afar as an int-based character you were forced to use Staff of Magnus or your spells. The Int-based cooldown reduction quickly made it so you could always fire off your stick, even if you couldn't use your other powers, so you always had a good backup.

Staff of Magnus' cooldown can't be reduced in OS2, and you can just blast out with wands to your heart's content, and dual wield with them to get SICK C-C-C-C-C-COMBOS of earth/fire or just keep blasting with one over and over again. Which begs the question, why use a staff?

Cause a staff is actually a melee weapon. It's not a bad one, either. If need be, a wizard can smack a guy real good who gets too close, and fire off the elemental effect on it. It's 2 ap, same as any other 2 handed attack. Which is fine(actually surprisingly good, it scales with int) when things get too close, but most of the time an int-heavy pure caster is gonna be in the back doing what their name says, castin' spells. The Witch and the Wizard, who have spells like Rain and Blood Rain and have Far Out(,)Man, start with a staff. If they're meant to be far away from the fight, what are they supposed to do with a staff? In the rounds when their spells recharge, they can only get so much AP back. It doesn't go all the way to like 10 anymore.

I'd like to see the cooldown for Staff of Magnus removed. Maybe put the AP cost up to 2 so it's a 2 handed attack. Or maybe the thinking is that staff classes have down-rounds? I'm not sure. But the weapon feels in a weird space, because a hybrid wouldn't use a staff, they'd use a melee weapon so they can check physical armour and use warfare/scoundrel skills, and taking a wand or two means you can spit out elemental damage whenever you dang well please. Why take a staff outside of an undying love of the weapon?

Last edited by Grondoth; 02/10/16 01:45 AM.
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Some people have argued in a similar thread about this as well.

I was initially on the side thinking SoM should get a 0-turn cooldown, but an argument changed my mind:

Originally Posted by Neonivek
Yep people got it down.

Wands are offensive weapons with a backup utility

Staffs are utility with a backup attack



Basically, wands are useful for the basic attacks, but have less combined attribute bonuses than staves do. Staves are meant more for spellcasting than attacking, and (at least according to some people) they have better stat bonuses than using two wands. This is about how it worked in D:OS 1 EE. Maybe?

However, in D:OS 2, there is now Memory as a limit to spellcasting. Because of Memory and being unable to switch skills, Staves are distinctly less useful than wands right now. So if Staves are supposed to be for those casters who use lots of skills, then perhaps Staffs should get inherent bonuses to Memory even before magic item modifiers are considered.


Last edited by Stabbey; 02/10/16 03:15 AM. Reason: clarification
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Wait: since when did staves give better bonuses in EE than two wands?

Otherwise, it'd be fine if it worked the way you stated

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I am going to play the Devil's Advocate here and say, that the staff is actually superior to the wand.

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I am not aware of staves giving stronger bonuses than wands. In my experience, dual wielding wands was always far superior in terms of stat bonuses, and still is in DOS 2. For example, I have Turner of the Tides, a legendary source weapon, that gives a whopping +2 INT. The most I've ever heard of is +9 on a staff. I have heard of wands giving +5/+2 INT/MEM before, and not to mention, with memory as it is if you haven't pumped literally every point you have into it, then you won't have enough spells to constantly cast. So staves are in a really bad spot right now IMO, although contrary to popular opinion, I've found that they are totally crazy for hybrid builds. My favorite build, the Mega Mage (1 warfare/1 scoundrel/1 marksman/1 pyro/1 hydro/1 aero/1 geo/1 necro) uses staves to enable Battle Stomp, allowing you to act whenever enemies are shielded by pesky magic armor, but are lacking physical. Still, I feel that staves could use a boost. +1 to lowering the cooldown and boosting the AP cost, since wands feel straight up stronger for everything that isn't a hybrid.

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Tell me, Limz, in your informed opinion, why do you think that staves are better?

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I dunno'.

Actually, I wrote about a scenario in which it actually is legit better and other people across threads have pointed out utility value (clarification).

It does count as a 2H melee weapon (warfare).

Last edited by Limz; 02/10/16 03:19 AM. Reason: Lolz context.
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Originally Posted by SlamPow
Oh great Limz! I beseech you! Shower me in your unending sagacious wisdom!


Originally Posted by Limz
I dunno, lol


Ah. Poetry to my ears.

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Well, I wanted to be an ass and be vague or say something like "Ohohohoho, there is a secret" but let's be real there are legitimate use cases for staves and, furthermore, in the current build you're kind of limited to gear RNG to begin with so you do want to spread out your itemization.

You could always do something silly like boulder => phoenix dive => whirlwind => crippling blow or something silly along those lines and you would be doing AoE + Physical Damage at a non-trivial rate.


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I would have liked the ass response, actually. laugh But that combo sounds pretty baller! I'll have to try it out. One thing, though - I've had issues with phoenix dive not blocking all fire damage. Is it possibly because my characters have been warm/burning, or is it something else I'm not aware of? It's only happened a few times, but occasionally I'll dive an oil barrel and just... die.

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Originally Posted by Limz
Well, I wanted to be an ass and be vague or say something like "Ohohohoho, there is a secret" but let's be real there are legitimate use cases for staves and, furthermore, in the current build you're kind of limited to gear RNG to begin with so you do want to spread out your itemization.

You could always do something silly like boulder => phoenix dive => whirlwind => crippling blow or something silly along those lines and you would be doing AoE + Physical Damage at a non-trivial rate.



You can certainly optimize staff use and even take it pretty far as a melee weapon.....I just don't see the point when I'd much rather be building up my spells and making them better.

Seems very counter intuitive to spec a mage for melee with his staff when a warrior does it better and you'd get further by capitalizing on your spells.

You do have a point about RNG though

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A warrior doesn't do anything better than a mage and vice versa. It's all context dependent. So, notice how Alexander has 600 armor and only 150~ some odd magic armor? And then notice how some mobs have very high magic armor but low to no physical armor.

Spells have cool downs and resource consumption, hitting people with a stick doesn't necessarily have the same draw back. Furthermore, given a certain amount of memory, you're actually better off using those melee skills to do damage because everything else is on cool down.

Pyrokinetics, Aerotheurge, Two Handed, Scoundrel, Warfare are relevant to staff builds or staff wielders. So there is plenty of carry over.

Damn it now I want to try a guerilla staff mage knight thing.

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I sorta see what you're getting at and I'm not saying it can't be fun or isn't good.

If you crunch the numbers though:
Seems to me that regardless of armor, by doubling down into a specialization for damage type you're better off giving yourself the tools to simply blow through the amor and then continuing on to blow through their health.

A heavily focused two handed warrior can basically kill pretty much all the regular enemies on one or two hits despite armor cause of how high you can stack everything.

In the same vain, a heavily focused mage with air/fire up high will blow through the magic armor and CC/burn/damage anything.

And once the defenses are down will be much more efficient in the actual killing and will certainly be better at liking things not armored for their damage type specialization.

There's also the fact that I'd give you're mage enough Memory, I doubt you'll be hurting for cool down spells all the time. And wands offer elemental combos from a distance for that odd turn you have nothing and one of your spells have normally set up for a combo.

What I get from you is that melee staff wizards are more of a dual class build that can focus on either physical or magical attacks depending on context......but we've always seen in these games how in combat heavy specialization can create overpowered builds that jack of all trades can't reach. Except in the case of using a lot spells for full field control.

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A staff deals magic damage on hit and benefits from the skills I listed previously.

Not all warfare skills deal physical damage.

Once armor is down then all damage of that type is equal. So, if I have a bunch of mages and some meleers with no armor because their armor got shredded earlier it actually is more efficient for me to use Crippling Strike on my Mage than to use spells since I can get kills.

Also, my mage isn't exactly losing any specialization by dumping points into pyrokinetics and favors wielding a staff.

You asked, thematically, what the point of a staff is and I am telling you that it provides non-trivial damage.


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Mean more mechanically, not thematically.

And the points in two handed and the spell/skill slots in memory not used for spells is what's lost.

Swinging a staff counts as magic damage? I know it scales with INT.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, but you definitely raise a valid point concerning armor. Hmmmmmmmmmm, maybe I am too hasty to consign staffs as useless. Not as pure mage weapons but as mage weapons for those who'd also like to have melee options and jump in.

Oh and I never thought it was non trivial just clearly not as good.

Last edited by aj0413; 02/10/16 06:05 AM.
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Depends on the staff you're holding but the majority seem to be elemental damage just like wands are.

Not all spells use skills a way to obtain value i.e haste, rage, etc. Also, if you're putting points into 2H it means your game plan is different and your entire use case is probably different so it should be evaluated that way. There's also the fact that you can get random skill points from items too or whatever buffs are out there. So, where the point comes from matters more than whether it is assigned or not.

Consider the current meta and then realize that pure mages can reach 400+ damage with crippling strike which is an AoE.

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I agree that it makes sense at this stage to simply remove the cool-down on Staff of Magnus and move it to 2 AP cost.


I wonder how well Staff skills work with melee based attack skills in Warfare?

I think it would be quite cool if they were really effective with Warfare skills, scaling with Intell and just using the base damage of the staff with their calculations. This might already be the case so I'll check it out in game.

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Hey Swiftwynd, I just finished a run with a solo mage generalist. Staves work well with warrior skills! My Crippling Blow does around 350 damage with no points in Strength, and Battering Ram and Battle Stomp are invaluable for soloing the game. Those skills, rage and Phoenix Dive are the only warrior skills I used, though, so they're the only ones I can comment on. But combined with hail strike, winter blast, electric discharge, blinding radiance and restoration, you can end up with plenty of both physical and magical CC, as well as good sustain, so I found the combination to be highly effective. The skills don't end up scaling with intelligence, though, since they're still warfare skills. But the chance-to-hit does, and they do use the base damage of the staff in their calculations, as you postulated.

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I think you still take a strength penalty to Warfare skills, but it's still competitive because abilities do scale up per level and also some skills are reliant on weapon damage so the penalties do get mitigated - I think.

Though some of the weapon skill ones just use the value not the actual property. Man, if only Crippling Blow was magical damage with a staff... it would be lulz.


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Originally Posted by SlamPow
Hey Swiftwynd, I just finished a run with a solo mage generalist. Staves work well with warrior skills! My Crippling Blow does around 350 damage with no points in Strength, and Battering Ram and Battle Stomp are invaluable for soloing the game. Those skills, rage and Phoenix Dive are the only warrior skills I used, though, so they're the only ones I can comment on. But combined with hail strike, winter blast, electric discharge, blinding radiance and restoration, you can end up with plenty of both physical and magical CC, as well as good sustain, so I found the combination to be highly effective. The skills don't end up scaling with intelligence, though, since they're still warfare skills. But the chance-to-hit does, and they do use the base damage of the staff in their calculations, as you postulated.


Larian didn't joke around when they said they'd give more love to hybrids. And for someone who adores hybrids, this is positively fascinating. Definitely makes staves worth it.

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